Monday, 13 April 2009

I have used OSCommerce for many years and always found the lack of functionality for Credit Orders or Exchanges difficult.

In the end, we used the "Edit Order" contribution to directly edit an order. But in the process we lost the order history and it went out of sync with our payments.

While a better system could and should be built into OSCommerce, at CTO we have defined a semi-automatic process to help.

It does assume that you calculate your sales (e.g. for VAT purposes) from Kashflow and not OSCommerce.

The logic is in 3 stages:1. The customer places an order containing 1 or more items.2. The customer returns 1 or more items for an exchange.3. You create a credit note for the original order and then issue a new invoice from within Kashflow for the new item(s).

The process uses KashFlows "Assign Advance Payment" functionality to ensure you keep track of how much is owed by you or the customer for any balance.

Instructions1. Go to your OSCommerce admin and create a new Order Status called "Exchanged".

Configure one of the 3 potential Credit Note triggers for the "Exchanged" order status.

You will want to exclude the delivery charge - because typically if a customer is returning a non-faulty item, you will not refund the outward delivery cost.

Also exclude the payment - as this is an exchange, you do not want to automatically assign a payment to the credit note - you are holding back the monies paid in order to put them towards the exchanged item.

3. Place a test order on your system. I will keep it simple for now and order one item. If your customer order several items and only wants to exchange one, you will need to manually edit the credit note to remove the items not being returned.

I placed an order for a USB mouse - and the system uploaded the invoice to Kashflow within about 20 seconds: